Blue Origin’s Rob Meyerson speaks at the 2016 International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in New Mexico. (ISPCS via YouTube)

Rob Meyerson, who was the president of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture until this year, says he’s left the company.

Since January, Meyerson has served as senior vice president, in charge of advanced development programs such as the Blue Moon lunar lander system and the New Armstrong interplanetary-class rocket. In an email, he told GeekWire that Friday was his last day at the company, which grew from 10 employees to more than 1,500 during his tenure.

Meyerson said he was “taking some time off to determine my next steps.”

The Michigan native came to Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin in 2003 from Kirkland, Wash.-based Kistler Aerospace, where he was a senior program manager, according to his LinkedIn website. Before Kistler, Meyerson was an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas for 12 years, working on the space shuttle and space station programs as well as the X-38 crew rescue vehicle program.

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